EMC Symmetrix

The Symmetrix is EMC's flagship enterprise storage array. There have been seven generations of Symmetrix hardware, with the first appearing in 1994 and the latest introduced in 2006.

History

In the mid-to-late 1980s, EMC was an add-on memory and minicomputer disk drive supplier, struggling with quality problems and a niche market presence. Dick Egan, the company's Co-founder and Chairman seized an opportunity and hired a team of Israeli developers, led by Moshe Yanai, who were at the time developing an IBM compatible mainframe product for Nixdorf Computer Corporation. The team had a vision to develop a high performance disk array for what was then the largest disk subsystem market, the IBM mainframe.

The Symmetrix began in 1990 as an ESCON and SCSI connected storage array, but rose to prominence with the introduction of Fibre Channel-based SANs. The product was initially popular within the performance hungry airline industry and customers who were willing to deviate from the safety of IBM's slower 3390 disk subsystem and take a risk with the unproven but substantially higher performance Symmetrix.

EMC eventually replicated its success in other industries and broadened its product line beyond mainframes into open systems and added innovative software features such as Disk mirroring and SRDF, a remote disk-to-disk replication capability.

Current Hardware

The high end DMX-3 array, fully populated holds 2400 disks (up to 500 GB FC drives), runs eighty 1.3 GHz PowerPC processors, half a terabyte of cache memory, and 64 2 GB Fibre Channel), or GigE/iSCSI front end connections.

DMX-2 configurations:

* Symmetrix DMX-800EL: 8-60 drives, 4-64 GB cache memory, 8 x 2 GB FC front ends, modular rack mount
* Symmetrix DMX-800: 60-120 drives, 4-64 GB cache memory, 16 x 2 GB FC front ends, modular rack mount
* Symmetrix DMX-1000: up to 144 drives, 64-128 GB cache memory, 48 x 2 GB FC front ends, single cabinet
* Symmetrix DMX-2000: up to 288 drives, 128-256 GB cache memory, 64 x 2 GB FC front ends, two cabinets
* Symmetrix DMX-3000: up to 576 drives, 128-256 GB cache memory, 64 x 2 GB FC front ends, three cabinets

DMX-3 configurations:

* Symmetrix DMX-3 950: non-expandable version of Symmetrix, up to 360 drives, up to 128 GB cache memory, 8 front-end ports, one or two cabinets
* Symmetrix DMX-3: up to 2400 drives, up to 512 GB cache memory, 64 x 2 GB FC front ends (even 4 Gb FC's are available at this time), two to nine cabinets

DMX-4 configurations:
* Symmetrix DMX-4: up to 1920 drives (or up to 2400 drives for 500 GB drive only configurations), up to 512 GB cache memory, 64 x 4 GB FC front ends, two to nine cabinets

ymmetrix Software

* Enginuity - Symmetrix Microcode
* TimeFinder/Clone
* TimeFinder/Mirror
* TimeFinder/Snap
* TimeFinder/FS including NearCopy and FarCopy (applicable only in the EMC Celerra NAS environment)
* SRDF/S - Synchronous data replication. Source is always is sync with the target. Semi-synchronous mode, where source is 1 I/O ahead of target, is also supported.
* SRDF/A - Asynchronous data replication. Source is minutes ahead of target.
* SRDF/DM - Data Mobility. It is a data migration tool for replicating source volumes to remote volumes over short or long distances.
* SRDF/Star - An add-on to SRDF/A and SRDF/S. It allows incremental replication to several other arrays.
* SRDF/CG - Consistency Groups. SRDF/CG helps maintain data coherency across a group of devices, local and remote.
* SRDF/AR - Automated Replication, combine SRDF/Timefinder and automation for rapid recovery over any distance. Source is hours ahead of target.
* SRDF/CE - Cluster Enabler, allows use of SRDF within HA Cluster frameworks (SRDF agent for VCS or MSCS)
* OpenReplicator - Copy data to/from any other device on the SAN
* OpenMigrator/LM - Seamless migration of Windows hosts from array to array (two reboots required, not other mods to the systems)
* LDMF - Data Migration for Mainframes
* EMC Control Center (ECC) - a family of products for graphical storage resource and device management. It supports disk arrays, SAN fabric switches, and host OSes by multiple vendors. ECC supports SMI-S and provides extensive monitoring capabilities. It also includes Storage Scope for performance and capacity data collection and trending.
* Solutions Enabler - API (written in C (programming language)) and CLI for managing Symmetrix arrays.
* Symmetrix Management Console (SMC) - GUI for managing Symmetrix
* EMC z/OS Storage Manager (EzSM) - Symmetrix management in a Mainframe environment

External links

* [http://www.gweep.net/~sfoskett/tech/symmwwn.html Symmetrix WWN Calculator]